The Works of William Herebert, OFM ed. by Stephen R. Reimer (review)

REVIEWS regardless of speech part) which necessitates extensive reading-through to answer questions of certain kinds. This, of course, is common to most concordances-but given the level of computerized sophistication in evi­ dence throughout most ofthis book, it seems legitimate to have wished for a better separation between parts. Some may find the "Statistical Ranking List" for the main text too statistically presented, a numbing blur ofletters and numerals, arabic and roman. Others may also cavil (but with reason, I think) that, had the concordance been expanded to include the 385 lines of "To King Henry IV, in Praise ofPeace," the volume wouldhave contained all of Gower's known English writing-perhaps a slight, but still very real, advantage in the long run. But by comparison with what this concordance offers us, these are cavils indeed. The powers of the computer have allowed Pickles and Dawson to publish not only each key word in its line context, in the main text and variants (manuscript Fairfax 3 and others, as reproduced in G. C. Macau­ lay's edition) but also enumerated frequency lists of the main and variant texts, reverse vocabularies of each, a "Concordance to the Frequent Words Al, Alie, Love, Man," samples ofall remaining frequent words, a rhyming index for the main and variant texts, and an index of capitalized words. In short, the result is a splendid contribution to Middle English studies, and an auspicious beginning for the new publication series of theJohn Gower Society. R. F. YEAGER University of North Carolina at Asheville STEPHEN R. REIMER, ed. The Works of William Herebert, OFM. Studies and Texts, vol. 81. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987. Pp. ix, 173. $18.00 paper. William Herebert, an English or Welsh Franciscan (ca. 1270-ca. 1333) who taught at Oxford and was connected with the Franciscan house at Hereford, has left us a manuscript in which he collected other people's works as well as six Latin sermons of his own making and nineteen Middle English poems thattranslate Latin liturgicalpieces ofvarious kinds. A note attached to the latter tells us that Herebert wrote "these hymns," etc., "in his own hand," and this distinctive hand can be found in annotations elsewhere in this as 279 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER well as in seven other manuscripts. British Library manuscript Additional 46919, thus, represents the "commonplace book" (in Reimer's termi­ nology; I would call it a miscellany) of a known friar, which not only suggests what materials a preacher found worth collecting but also gives some insight into his work of composing and revising sermons and ver­ nacular poems, since the texts in both cases are accompanied by deletions, insertions, and marginal addenda. Reimer offers an edition ofHerebert's six Latin sermons, a seventh sermon that is written in Herebert's hand but differs in style from the six that are identified as his, a number of sermon outlines, and all the English poems that appear en bloc in the manuscript (nineteen) or occur elsewhere in Herebert's hand (four). The edition itself is introduced(pp. 1-25) witha discussionofHerebert's identityand life, themanuscript, his sermonsand theirrhetorical form, his poems, and Reimer's editorial principles. Reimer suggests that Herebert may have collected all the works present in the manuscript for possible use in preaching, though he gives no very compelling reason why Herebert included advice on choosing a husband, a treatise on hunting, or a cook­ book. The last, incidentally, has been recently edited by Hieatt and Butler in EETS, s.s., vol. 8 (1985). The text of the sermons in the manuscript is clear but complicated: clear because Herebert's hand is easy to read once one has mastered the abbrevia­ tions and suspensions common in this type of literature, complicated because of the many marginal corrections and additions. Reimer re­ produces the text as well as the marginal addenda; to this he adds textual notes, which mostly describe such details as marginal or interlinear addi­ tions and scribal corrections, and a further set of notes that identify Herebert's quotations. Spot checking his edition against a film of the manuscript shows his transcription to be reasonably accurate. In...